A label on the verso indicates that the picture was painted for General the Hon. Edmund Phipps (1760-1837). It adds that the sportsman is Phipps’s nephew, Colonel Sir Charles Beaumont Phipps (1801-66), and the farmer’s daughter pouring the sportsman a drink is Phipps’s niece, Lady Lepel Charlotte Phipps (d.1869). Scenes of this kind recall seventeenth-century Dutch painting which was a great influence on Wilkie (cf.Metsu, 'The Sleeping Sportsman', P251).